Pink and Black Graduation Cake

We’re in the midst of graduation season, so I decided to leave a quick post about a cake that I made for a recent high school grad. Unfortunately, the pictures don’t look that great, but here’s what it looked like!

Obviously the grad was a girl, judging by how overwhelmingly pink it is 😉 I was pretty pleased by how the cake turned out and so was the grad and her family!

The bottom cake was a dark chocolate cake with a chocolate buttercream filling, and the top cake was red velvet with a vanilla bean filling–both very delicious!

The graduation cap was actually an upside-down chocolate cupcake that I cut the top off of, frosted, and covered in black fondant. For the top of the hat, I cut a square out of foamcore board and covered that in fondant as well. The diploma was just white rolled-up fondant with gift ribbon tied around it.

This was my first time making fondant since my last catastrophe eight years ago. I made a 3-ft tall (6-tiered) wedding cake for my senior project–why I decided to make it so friggin’ ginormous, I have no idea. Anyway, I must’ve made about ten pounds of fondant (that’s A LOT of powdered sugar!) to cover all of the cakes only to discover that the fondant I made was NOT going to work. I attempted to cover one of the cakes, but the fondant was way too heavy and nowhere near as pliable as it needed to be, so I had to rip it off of the cake and throw all of the fondant away. Instead of attempting another fondant recipe, I ultimately decided to go the store-bought route in order to ease my ailing frustrations. 

Luckily, this time around I had a much, much, MUCH better experience with the fondant recipe that I used. Eight years later, I am cured of my longstanding phobia of making homemade fondant. Yay me! If you’re interested in making your own fondant as well, check out this recipe!

While I don’t have any pictures of the inside of the cake, stay tuned because I have something in mind for next week’s recipe post that I think you’re gonna love!